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Ex-Mayor Livingstone Mayor Johnson

Boris on a roll

Great news earlier this month when Boris Johnson confirmed that he was going to run again as London Mayor. Even better news today that he is comfortably ahead in the polls. Today’s Evening Standard carries the headline “Boris ‘To be Mayor again’” and reports that he is comfortably ahead of both of his potential Labour opponents.

May 2012 is a way long time in the future but Boris is going to be very hard to beat. Ken Livingstone is looking like the favourite to win the Labour selection competition. I cannot believe that Labour are letting him run again. Above all Boris has retained his innate likeability in office. After 8 years in power Livingstone had achieved a reputation for twisting the truth, nepotism and petty corruption.

Livingstone is using the “C” word to try to bring Boris down:

Boris Johnson cannot escape the fact that the he has pioneered huge cuts in London and he vigorously campaigned for his Tory colleagues to win the general election, knowing full well the economic policy they would deliver and the damage they would do to policing and transport. The government’s cuts are his cuts.

Personally I think that people will see through this and pin the blame where it is deserved, on Gordon Brown.

Ealing’s Labour crowd are falling over themselves to back Livingstone. MPs Pound and Sharma along with Sharma’s bag carrier, council leader Julian Bell, and 15 of his councillors have signed up to the Livingstone campaign here. That means 25 haven’t. Ashamed? I guess.

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Ealing and Northfield

CPZ charges

At yesterday’s cabinet meeting the council decided to raise parking charges in Ealing by £1.5 million a year and CPZ charges in particular by £683,000. Follow this link and scroll down to page 12 to see the details. Also see Gazette piece here.

Tonight we will be discussing CPZ finances and charges at the CPZ scrutiny panel. If you look at the papers here you will see that contrary to popular belief CPZs actually cost the council money. They are a cost centre, not a profit centre. See the key paper here.

If you would like to get involved in the discussion about CPZ finances and charges please come to the CPZ Specialist Scrutiny Panel tonight at 7pm in Committee Room 3 at the Town Hall, see agenda here.

The scrutiny meetings are not meant to be political – the purpose of scrutiny is to challenge the executive to ensure that decisions are sound and taken on the basis of facts. As chairman it will be my job to get to the facts and cut through the waffle. That said it is worth spelling out the political background to this decision. The previous Tory administration made a manifesto commitment in 2006 to freeze all parking charges as a result of a widespread feeling that motorists had been poorly treated by the council in the past. The new Labour council may well have a different attittude to car drivers, it also has to deal the current political and economic climate where we are due to have a very hard spending review which will result in large savings having to be made. In local government finance a saving can be a cut or it can be a rise in charges for services such as parking. The £1.5 million rise in parking charges is only a small fraction of the overall £53 million savings that the new Labour council reckons it will have to make over the next three years.

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Ealing and Northfield

Pound does not get it

I just caught up with Ealing North MP, Stephen Pound’s, column in the Gazette.

Without any hint of contrition, given that his party has just ended a 13 year stint in power, he uses most of his space to essentially complain about how the state treated him when he went to do jury service.

One reason why I am delighted to be back at the gas-works is that I have just completed the most mindnumbingly tedious two weeks of jury service and, frankly, anything would be an improvement.

Good on Pound for not trying to wriggle out of it as many do but his whinging does make you wonder. Obviously Pound hasn’t tried to report a crime to the police recently. Or, apply for unemployment benefit. Does this man not have any idea how the state typically treats the citizen? Doh!

The average MP costs us £633K, see here. It is a shame that Pound did not use his time to think about how the system could be improved.

No mention in his piece about the Tube strike either. Of course that is because Pound eschews public transport and drives to and from work where he has the use of Parliament’s underground car park. His last line gives it away:

… there is much to do before I succumb to the lure of the westbound A40.

How the other half live and how pleased Pound is to be back in the warm embrace of our £500 million a year Parliament?

Categories
National politics

The BBC cuts the cuts by 60%

I missed the BBC London Spending Review debate last night. You can see it here.

It was a typical BBC production. Pretending to be balanced while at the same time inserting patently left leaning voices as independently minded people.

The show opened with a hyped 4 minute package on “the cuts”. Talking about London councils’ BBC London’s political correspondent Karl Mercer intoned:

Our research suggests the total of cuts for the next three years could be as high as £2 billion.

Ooops. That is £3 billion or 60% less than their number yesterday and probably double the actual number, see here. Their “research” (read finger in the air) almost certainly does not take into account the effect of some of the smaller grant settlements and certainly won’t account for the fact that a large chunk of these “cuts” will be achieved by rises in service charges.

Some of the people talking were quite clearly stooges. I will highlight a couple in the following posts.

Categories
National politics

The BBC’s idea of a NHS worker

It’s not where the cuts are, it’s who they effect. And at the moment they are affecting more vulnerable people and all the economists are saying that.

Who is this impassioned NHS worker speaking on last night’s BBC London spending review debate? A nurse? A doctor? A senior manager having to make ghastly decisions? Er, no. She is a communications and PR person who works for a London mental health trust.

On the side Brumfitt is a performance poet who has appeared at a number of festivals and even made it on to Radio 4. Apparently she only started work in London in February and already she is on the telly pretending to be a NHS worker. Will the protection of the NHS ensure that people like her continue to have jobs? I hope not.

In her remarks she complains that the housing benefit cap for a single low paid worker in Westminster is “only” £14K and that this compares badly with an MPs allowance of £24K. She is right but so wrong. On what planet can we afford to keep a single person on £14K of housing benefits? Most working young people in London who pay the taxes out of which housing benefit comes pay £500 per month to share a flat in the suburbs and then pay to go into town on the Tube or whatever.

Let me make three guesses about Brumfitt: she is Oxbridge educated (the burning sense of entitlement shines through), she socialises with BBC people, she will appear with a red rosette on a doorstep near you one day soon.

Categories
National politics

The BBC and the cuts

Today the BBC has a piece about how the forthcoming spending review will affect London’s councils. They say:

London councils ‘planning for £5bn cuts by 2014’

Councils in London on average are preparing cut their budget by 24% over three years, BBC London has learned. The 32 local authorities currently spend a total of £22bn and if that is reduced by 24%, about £5bn will be cut from the budget by 2014. This would see jobs go in at least 17 councils and services reduced.

The article is accompanied by the BBC’s nifty new Spending Review logo. Apparently this was going to be a big pair of scissors and use the “C” word until they decided to play with a straight bat.

Either the BBC are being sloppy or their bat is not so straight. The right cuts number is more like £1 billion across London rather than £5 billion. They fail to take into account that education spending, especially the frontline bit, is being protected and that much of council spending is covered by charges, not by government grants and that councils do have scope to increase charges if they wish.

Ealing is one of the biggest councils in London and its savings figure, which will no doubt be achieved is large part by increases in charges as well as cuts, is £53 million over the period, see below. There are 32 London councils (excluding the City of London). Multiply £53 million by 32 and you get £1.7 billion which I suspect is an overestimate in any case as Ealing is so large. Account for Ealing being large and exclude increases in charges and the cuts are more like £1 billion or only 5% of total spending.

The use of the single quote marks in the headline is very strange. Who is the anonymous author quoting. His or herself? Given that the number is total pants are they using the quote marks to give it false authority?

Is the BBC being malign or sloppy?

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Ealing and Northfield

Ealing and the cuts

Our own council has already been very clear about their views of how the spending review will affect Ealing. The Council announced that Ealing would face having to make “savings” of £53 million at its cabinet meeting on 22nd June. This is a target that seeks to reduce by 25% the amount of funding the council needs from government – a sensible assumption. Savings can be “cuts” or price increases for charged services. If the Council could make these savings they could leave the council tax unchanged for the next three years. See the June cabinet paper here.

In their manifesto Labour promised:

Keeping your council tax low with a freeze in the first year.

After four years of Conservative rule Ealing residents know what low means. It means zero or the odd 1%. Not 3% or 5%.

Labour are clearly in a vice – a vice that was entirely to be expected and it is no use complaining that the manifesto was written without any foreknowledge that there would be hard times to come. It is worth noting that the deficit last year was £155 billion. In other words the Labour government borrowed £5,000 on behalf of each and every worker in the UK during the course of one year. That kind of death spiral had to be stopped.

During the course of the last four year Tory administration the Council achieved savings in the order of £60 million with pretty much no-one noticing significant changes to the services that they receive so it is not unreasonable to suppose that £53 million savings target will not be the end of the world however much the Labour council tries to blame the Coalition for its problems.

If you want to keep in touch with what is going on keep an eye on the cabinet agenda. The first £5 million tranche of savings are already online prior to next Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, see here.

Categories
Ealing and Northfield

Good news – sort of

Cllr Bell has been driving around the borough getting his picture taken again. This time at Gurnell swimming pool where the new Labour administration plan to put the skate park. Someone needs to tell Cllr Bell that beyond the age of 30 you don’t want to get photographed from below. Even some of the kids in this photo have double chins.

The history of the skate park up until May was one of transparent and sensible government. It was originally planned for Elthorne Park and two thirds of people adjacent to Elthorne Park supported it when they were asked in a consultation in June last year. It should have been operating right now, this autumn. Instead thanks to the machinations of local Labour activists the plan was held up by a spurious village green application and finally killed by the new Labour council administration.

The council’s press release today says:

Good news for skateboarders

Ealing Council is inviting residents to have their say on proposals to build a new skate park and outdoor play area in the grounds of Gurnell Leisure Centre.

The Council’s current administration reviewed initial plans to build the facility in Elthorne Park and this week announced the alternative location next to Gurnell Leisure Centre in Ruislip Road East.

Good news indeed as long as you don’t mind an eighteen month delay. Some of the young people in the photo with Cllr Bell will be at uni before this thing gets built.

Cllr Bell goes on to say:

We are really excited about the new plans and want to involve local people throughout the process. There are already a number of fantastic sports facilities in the north of the borough and we are hoping the skate park will add a new dimension and help support our long-term vision to promote the area as a sports hub in time for the 2012 Olympics.

It does seem strange to me that yet another sports facility is being added to the north of the borough. Couldn’t have anything to do with Labour’s calculation of where their voters live could it? If the skate park does finally get built and your kids end up having to commute to Gurnell you know who to blame.

Categories
Mayor Johnson

Why the Tube unions are barking

http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1

Unusually for me I went into town today and was not greatly inconvenienced by the Tube strike unless you count having to spend £27 on cabs to get me from Paddington to Westminster and back. Today’s headline in the Standard is “Defiant commuters beat the Tube strike to get to work”. I saw lots of people walking and cycling in largely good humour.

In a comment piece Simon Jenkins rails against “dinosaur” Bob Crow. I think he draws the wrong conclusions by suggesting that Crossrail should be cancelled and funds directed at existing services. Jenkins is mixing up capital and revenue.

The real problem with the Tube is that fares are extremely high yet Tube costs are so out of control that the Treasury has to inject almost £600 million a year of subsidy into it. You can run six Ealing hospitals for that kind of money. Bob Crow is mad if he thinks that the rest of the country is going to bear giving Londoners 56p every time they get on a Tube. Tube costs have got to be bought down and Crow’s overpaid members are a large part of the problem. See five year’s worth of revenue and expenditure figures below (taken from TfL website here).


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Ex-Mayor Livingstone Mayor Johnson

Tube unions at it again

As of 11:10pm this evening 7 out of 11 Tube lines were out of service as the latest Tube strike starts to bite. Although this is a joint venture between the RMT and the TSSA unions it is RMT’s nasty and aggressive general secretary Bob Crowe who stands out.

Only in August of this year it emerged that Crow’s salary had risen by 12% last year taking his total package to £133,183 per annum. Being a ludicrously fat cat doesn’t stop Crow bed blocking in a housing association property though. What a twerp? Of course Crow’s RMT does not publish these figures on its own website, you have to root around the website of the Certification Officer (for trade unions) to find them, here.

Today Andrew Gilligan at the Telegraph points out the links between Labour mayoral hopeful Ken Livingstone and TSSA, here. Tonight the Mayor is speaking out against these strikes, see here. Livingstone is silent. Don’t forget that in 2012.